Samuel Fallours and his fantasy fish

LOBSTERS that live on mountains, fish with top hats on their bellies and mermaids that utter mouse-like cries. Welcome to the weird world of Samuel Fallours.

In 1719, Fallours published the world's first colour catalogue of fish. A soldier turned clergyman's assistant, he lived on the island of Ambon in what is now Indonesia. The fish he painted were caught off Ambon in the Banda Sea. This area lies at the heart of the Coral Triangle, which is thought to contain more marine species than any other region of the world.

Just 100 copies of his catalogue were published, making it "one of the rarest natural history books on Earth", says Theodore Pietsch, a professor of marine science at the University of Washington in Seattle who has assembled the plates into a new book, Tropical Fishes of the East Indies.

When Europeans were confronted with Fallours's images, many doubted that such brightly coloured species existed, so flamboyant were they, compared with the drab creatures found in European waters.

They were right to be sceptical. "Fallours applied colour, more often than not, in a totally arbitrary fashion," says Pietsch. In the plate above, the dull stonefish (number 37) can be seen decked out by Fallours in vivid reds, yellows and blues. He also embellished the flanks of fish with suns, moons, stars and pots of flowering plants. Look closely at the wrasse at number 38 and you'll see images of three human heads topped by red hats.

"Fallours probably invented some of the extraordinary beasts he painted and a few outlandish stories to go with them in order to attract European collectors with an eye for the bizarre," says Pietsch. For example, Fallours claimed that the spiny lobster, Panulirus ornatus, lived in the mountains, climbed trees, ate fruit and laid red-spotted, blue eggs "as large as those of a pigeon".

Yet Pietsch insists that it would be unduly harsh to dismiss Fallours's paintings as having no scientific merit. He estimates that only 10 per cent of the paintings are imaginary. The rest can be identified to species, genus or family level.

The paintings are valuable for another reason, too. "Ambon's harbour is now heavily polluted with sewage, bottles, cans and plastic bags," Pietsche says. "The kinds of fish that live there have probably changed since Fallours's time," making this an invaluable if slightly whimsical record.

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